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Gary Freed

Gary L. Freed

Percy and Mary Murphy professor of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine and professor of Health Management and Policy in the School of Public Health

Dr. Freed is the Percy and Mary Murphy professor of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine and professor of Health Management and Policy in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  He currently serves as Associate Chair for Government Relations, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Department of Pediatrics and as Director of Faculty Programs for the Office of Health Equity and Inclusion for the Michigan Medical School.

From 1998-2013, Dr. Freed served as director of the Division of General Pediatrics and founding director of the Children’s Health Evaluation and Research Center. From 2013-2016, Dr. Freed divided his time between the University of Michigan and the University of Melbourne (Australia) where he served as director of the Australian Health Workforce Institute, professor of Population Health, and as visiting scholar in Health Care Policy at the Royal Children’s Hospital. In 2016 Dr. Freed returned full time to the University of Michigan to continue his research in health policy and economic issues focused on children.

Dr. Freed has more than 25 years of experience in children’s health services research. He has been the principal investigator of numerous federal, state and foundation-funded grants, and of the first pediatric health services research fellowship program funded by the National Institutes of Health. He has published more than 300 peer-reviewed articles on child health policy and health economics, immunizations, physician behavior, the medical workforce and inter-specialty variation in the provision of preventive services to children.

Dr. Freed received his bachelor’s degree from The University of Texas at Austin, his medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and his Master of Public Health degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At UNC-CH, Dr. Freed was a Robert Wood Johnson clinical scholar as well as a preventive medicine fellow.

He is a past president of the Society for Pediatric Research, the largest research society in the field of child health. SPR awarded him its 2009 Douglas K. Richardson Lifetime Achievement Award for Perinatal and Pediatric Health Care Research.  He has also received the 2018 Distinguished Alumni Award from Baylor College of Medicine and the 2019 Academy Health Pediatric Section Lifetime Achievement Award.

Dr. Freed serves on several national and international committees regarding child health. He is past chair of the Department of Health and Human Services National Vaccine Advisory Committee. He is a frequent consultant to state and federal agencies as well as to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and to the World Health Organization. He is a member of the American Board of Pediatrics and a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

B.A., Biology, The University of Texas at Austin; M.D., Baylor College of Medicine; M.P.H., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Key Issues

Faculty Projects

  • Program on Equity In Child Health (PECH) at Mott Hospital This project aims to examine the potential for inequity resulting from variation in the actual care provided by clinicians and hospital personnel to children and their families. Considerable research demonstrates differences by gender, income, race and ethnicity in the way adult patients are provided care across numerous conditions (e.g., heart attacks, treatment for pain, diagnostic […]